>i don't want to beat a dead horse,
well if you want, i may have some spare viagara to liven it up....
> and i think this conversation is winding down. but i do want to say
> this: precisely the point of this discussion is not, as you understood
> carrol (rightly or wrongly), to shut out the non-professionals, but
> rather to try to understand how that straightforward common sense
> definition of pornography is insufficient for an analysis of the literary
> AND other (social, historical, economic, etc.) aspects of pornography.
i also think carrol and miles were trying to point out that sometimes we make generalizing statements, applying our own subjective experience to every one every where. e.g., -- all het men favor hetlez pr0n, that they do so because they are competitive and possessive about the women in the flick and a male elicits those feeligns and anxieties; that they do so because when men are in the flick it unleashes repressed homoerotic desires which make them uncomfortable; yadda; that men are visual creatures, far more so than women.
i think the question elicited personal reflections and the language people used distanced them from the topic so they could appear to speak for all men who enjoy hetlez pr0n. without that appeal you could be interpreted as admitting, "hell yeah, i look at hetlez pr0n and this is what i like!"
even when Miles wrote, he stamped his claims with the subjective but did so in an interesting way. miles wanted to say that he didn't get much out of hetlez pr0n, but his wife did. miles can admit he has seen hetlez pr0n but has done so with his wife. this makes the activity much more legitimate, donnint? (i have no way of knowing why miles brought up his wife, but it struck me that after four or five years reading miles, i've only now heard about a wife. not an attack on you miles, it just made me pause and wonder.... i'm prepared to receive my punishment.)
in other venues, a more typical tack is self-deprecation: "hell yeah, i watch pr0n cause i'm such an ugly bastard i can't get a date." among hackers, "i'm such an asocial bastard i can't get a date." here, watching pr0n is legitimated by reference to one's status as undesirable, worn like a badge of honor. which is interesting in so far as that sort of rhetoric seems far more available to men than women. women might acknowledge that they can't get a date, but its invariably by reference to the lack of people with whom to have sex. desirable people, that is. which is why so many hetmen have a hard time believing women don't have power. :)
anyway, i think we can benefit from social science lit here (of course, i'm a social scientist), but see nothing particular wrong with lack of ref to it, given the question that was actually asked. for all the representations of sex out here, how little we know about what people actually think and do about it. discussing these topics may be illuminating -- though i can see carrol's and miles' point that it can also reinscribe already existing ideologies, unexamined "common sense".
when ken first mentioned Lynn Hunt, i googled and came across a book by David Loftus about men and pornography. On his Web page, he claims that the 150 men he spoke with could be characterized as desiring more plot and romance in pr0n; not especially interested in closeups so they can see it all; enjoy hetlez sex but don't believe they're really lezbeans; don't like the way men are portrayed; etc.
http://www.david-loftus.com/watchsex.html
i haven't read the book and i imagine you could rip the guy's methodology to shreds, but the validity of his findings aren't the point. what i wanted to highlight is something i think Jeffrey is trying to say: we _can_ look at the way pr0n operates, the messages its creators are trying to send, and that may well be very distinct from the way its received by its audience. but that doesn't make the project illegitimate. indeed, it should make us ask why a little more insistently. what's going on? think about it in another context: Jane Radway wanted to look at the way women receive romance novels. the messages its creators are sending can be examined and then contrasted to the readers' interpretations of the material. for all the 'patriarchal' (sorry, shorthand) crap doled out in these novels, the stay-at-home mothers reading the books used them to carve out time for themselves. in spite of their own gender ideology, they resisted it by insisting on time for themselves to read and enjoy romance novels.
i suspect we can see similar things when it comes to pr0n-- a rupture between creators' intending meanings and the reception of those meanings. a guy on the old pulp culture list once made me think pretty hard about this when he argued quite persuasively that, the pr0n he's watched, tends to make him feel as women have all the power. that the feminist claim that women are degraded was very strange to him.
kelley